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Oakley Helped Win World War II!

Sun, 02/15/2009 - 11:20am — carol.meadows

In the book written for the City of Cincinnati, "Cincinnati a Guide to the Queen City and its neighbors" published in 1943, it says that "Oakley, nerve center of Cincinnati's contribution to war production, is an industrial suburb lying between Norwood and Madisonville. Most of the area now included in the suburb was purchased in 1846 by Anthony Brown.Â Paul Shuster, former resident of Alsace-Lorraine, bought 34 acres in 1853 and named it Oakley, because of the preponderance of Oak trees.Â Villagers, however, dubbed Shusterville.Â The Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad came through in 1857, but even as late as 1880 the community had less than 200 inhabitants."

"It was during the 1890's that Oakley began to grow.Â At that time the Oakley race track threw open its gates and became famous.Â A State law prohibiting betting, passed a few years later, caused the race track to close.Â Efforts of the Gentlemen's Matinee Club to restore its prestige with harness racing failed, and the track soon was covered by homes for the factory workers who flocked here in 1907 when the Oakley factory colony was begun under the auspices of the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company."

Oakley became the center for entrepreneurs and the Cincinnati equivalent of the Industrial age!Â Skills learned originally from the River Boat technology help to promote the region and many companies opened up in Oakley to build machinery for many different trades, including furnaces, motor-driven lathes, lubricating machinery, conveying machinery, planers and boring mills, metal drilling machines, and much other industrial equipment necessary to push this country to success during the wars and intoÂ the 20th Century.